Well, gotta say, Arkansas isn't so bad. Think of the large amount of $$'s in the state. Heard of Wal-Mart? Started and still hq'ed there.

Acxiom...one of the largest dealers and maintainers of 'people data' started in Conway, and has expanded into Little Rock. Trans-Union relies on them for data needs...so, they do indeed handle a lot of data.

Alltel is based in Little Rock.

Steven's corporation and many other financial houses are in AR. So...it isn't quite a po-dunk as you might think. Hell, in Little Roc

Why contract with South Asians when you can contract with businesses run by good old American Indians?

This is not as funny as it seems. I often though Hopi would make excellent computer programmers. People who speak Hopi fluently can you tell you that the language does not support ambiguity.

Navajo is another language that may be good for "thinking like a computer programmer". The language's grammar has something similar to the "type-safety" found in OO languages like C++ and Java. The type-safety

I think the bigger point is that you are more than welcome to sue the ghosts of Infantry's pasts for delivering government-supported beatdowns and the ghosts of many now-dead politicians for their bad decisions. But your ability to compensate for past offenses decreases over time because everybody who was actually hurt as well as anybody related to decisions made is dead. Somebody probably got away with murdering one of my ancestors back in history. If I walk past their descendent now, am I entitled to any sort of compensation? Will I even be able to know that they killed my ancestor long ago?

Hell yeah. I want the land those damned Saxons stole from my Briton ancestors. Although, I'm torn, because I also want the land my Viking ancestors stole from everyone else and then lost again. It's so confusing.

So, why should the Indians be treated any different? Just because they were so weak militarily and behind the times in military technology doesn't mean they deserve protection from the rest of the world. They simply get what the rest of the world, or whoever conquers them, decides that they should get.

And US citizens wonder why so many want to kill you, at whatever cost to themselves...

It's true that the US and Canada did conquer many tribes and take away a lot of land, but most of the remaining tribes weren't conquered, rather they tended to settle with the US and agreed to a series of treaties. Eventually the US government decided to settle with the tribes uniformly so they could co-exist with the states, while being bound by federal law.

Now, if I can address you last comment.

Personally, I think the Indians should feel lucky that we gave them anything at all instead of just assimilating them into our society as just one more ethnic group in the already-growing melting pot.

If you were an Indian, that statement would probably sound a lot like: Personally, I think the Jews should feel lucky we didn't gas and incinerate them all.

While saying circumstances could always be worse is technically a valid point, it's appalling and bad form to use it to play down culpability for any atrocity.

Actually, it's depleted uranium. Not as toxic as plutonium, but still not exactly pixie dust.

It's used by the military for an unusual property -- when DU munitions strike armor or metal, they basically vaporize themselves in a heat flash, allowing DU shells to cut through tank armor.

Unfortunately for anyone nearby, or living in the nation being attacked, when the DU vaporizes, it leaves an extremely fine radioactive dust in the air, which then settles and pollutes the area, as well as being inhaled

It's used by the military for an unusual property -- when DU munitions strike armor or metal, they basically vaporize themselves in a heat flash, allowing DU shells to cut through tank armor.

Actually, the reason why they went through tank armor was because, by volume, they're the heaviest thing you can throw at the enemy. High mass, small impact zone = massive penetrating power. Thus they can cut through armor not because they're on fire, but because they're bullets which are 15% heavier than lead, and a

Cool! I'll be by soon to shoot you and take your land. You might mind, but I don't care! Fuck you, you fucking fuck! It'll be mine soon, 'cuz whoever has the most guns wins!
I'll also kill your whole family, just for kicks. Yeehaw!

I'd be willing to bet they can get better pay and job security running casinos.

I live in the State of Washington where indian casinos are all over the place. I have to say that the casinos don't help the average indian very much.

The tribal elders get a nice kick back from the big gaming companys ( Trump, etc.) but that doesn't pull the average indian up any. They may get a yearly profit sharing check but that just means that they can have a plasma screen and DirectTV in the single-wide. Few of the

It's easy for you to say that -- you can move to any other town or state, and still remain in your own culture. Imagine if the situation was reversed, and you lived in a little pocket of European American culture, and 99.9% of the rest of the country was Native American. Would you still find moving away to be such an easy option?

Left "my" country when I was just over 17. Knew nobody in the new world. Learned the lanuage and cultutre, went to Uni., etc. No problem.After a while I went to Japan; yet another "alien" culture. Learned the language and some of the culture, worked, etc. No problem.I am not special and nowhere near unique; there are millions of people who do this kind of stuff all the time...

I grew up in moderately rural Pennsylvania. In my late teens I moved to Florida. I moved to Massachusetts. I moved to New York City. I moved to California. I moved to Montana (and brought everyone in my company with me and bought them houses as a perk.:) I've spent considerable time in India, England, Spain, Japan, Korea (south) and China. Also quite a few tropical islands for a few weeks here and there. I speak fluent Korean, bad Japanese, even worse Chinese, decent Spanish and... uh... moderately understandable American, at least if you don't hail from a ghetto or a rez.:)

A little more about me (there is actually a point to this, please bear with me): I'm 50 now, and I live about 20 miles from a major indian reservation in Montana. In my various travels, I have met many indians (both native Americans and "India"ns), Aussies, English folk, uncounted large numbers of Chinese, ditto South Americans (serious time in Florida, remember), quite a large number of Japanese, and lots of uprooted east coasters on the left coast and vice versa. Southerners up north, and northerners down south. I've been hanging with a girl from Kansas for about ten years.

You know who the least respectable of the bunch are? The ones who never left home. That's right. The (American) indians I've met in the cities and the schools, those people are smart and interesting and looking to do something with themselves. The indians I've met here, however, are a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. They live off the dole, they drink like camels (if camels drank alchohol) and they don't do squat worth anything to either their little microcosm or American society at large (unless you count providing justificaiton for major amounts of employment in the FBI, the BIA, and several other large government operations.)

In sharp contrast, the "furrin" folk I've met have been a delight to interact with, both personally and professionally. They, somehow, managed to drag themselves out of their "own cultures" without complete mental collapse, intolerable levels of angst, or having to scuttle back home to get that welfare/dole/tribal-residency check. I have noticed that in many cases, particularly Japanese and Chinese and Korean folk, they tend to turn their living spaces into little cultural "nodes" in a space made up of American culture. Seems to work very well, too - they have a place to go that is culturally "them", and they don't implode like postal workers.

Now... you seriously think American indians are so involved with their culture, of all things, that they actually are so mentally disabled that they can't get out of an area about the size of a typical large state's county? If that's truly the case, then we should probably just toss the whole rez idea in the trash - because keeping their culture is too expensive for them.

Now me, I don't think it is the culture, that is, the indian-ness of them. I think it is the welfare "we will reward you if you stay here" approach that we do to them. I think it is the "we will give you more for each baby you pop out" that we do to them. I think it is the "you can put casinos here, while folks outside the rez can't because mommy and daddy government say so" that we do to them. That's right. I don't blame them. I blame people like you, who, in their haste to be all touchy-feely, don't give minorities and the disadvantaged room to compete on an even playing field because you smother them with "aw gee, baby got a boo-boo? Lemme give you a check for that."

I say, let them have the land. Let them celebrate whatever they think they have to celebrate. But make them compete on an even playing field with everyone else, and pretty soon, you'll see that they are like everyone else. The potential is there. I've seen it, and I am certain of it. First shoot the social workers. Then shoot the lawyers.

I live in Lead, South Dakota, near Deadwood. Have seen firsthand the conditions of the "Native Americans" both on and off the res. I concur. Stop the welfare, and give these people a chance to solve their own problems. These are bright, intelligent people. But, welfare handouts seldom do anything other than enable them to fall into a lifestyle that is destructive and degenerative. Go to the Pine Ridge, the Rosebud, or other reservations and SEE what the conditions are. More "free" money is not going to make the lives of the people better, except perhaps enable some to buy a better quality of booze, and a nicer car to trash. All the damn do gooders who sincerely want to help think that they can solve these problems by giving more money.
To say or imply that people can come to the United States from various third world repressive shitholes in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe, with no or limited english language skills, immigrate to the United States, and within several years be a functioning succsessful and contributing part of our culture, yet think that the Native Americans somehow need more "help" in order to succeed, is to denigrate their entire race. I am sure that there are some exceptions, as I have met and seen a few of them, but, overall, the results of government handouts is a failure.
As for the rest of this tread, we moved here to get OUT of a big stinking, crime ridden metropolis of 2+ million. Cost of living is so much lower, and a traffic jam is what happens when a herd of deer of flock of wild turkeys need to cross the road... It was a total quality of life improvement, although if you measure the results in dollars, we are now down near poverty level income. It is amazing, however what so little money can do, when you are debt free and don't have a mortgage or car payment. No way I could have a semi retired lifestyle if I was still in the Denver Metro area. For an equivilent lifestyle, I would need to earn many times what I can get by on here, since I would still be trying to pay off a 200K+ mortgage. Instead, we have 3 houses, with 2 of them rented. We have found that living in a rural community gives us a life, and the big city was slavery, where you worked 60+ hours a week, just to pay for the basics. I have also noticed that many who have never been lived in a rural area think that what you have out here are just a bunch of dumb fsck hicks. I have found that a major portion of the residents are well educated, and a large percentage have moved here from the big cities for the same reasons we did. No, we don't have the opera, 12 screen theaters, 500 restraunts and clubs, and large shopping "mauls". But, that is something we didn't really care about since (because of working 60+ hours a week) we didnt have time for, or enjoy anyway. We have instead, clean air & water, no commute, happy safe children, decent neighbors, almost zero stress, bike and hiking trails, downhill and x-c skiing, hunting and fishing, and the time to enjoy it all.

If everyone around you is on welfare and barely getting by, then how realistic are things like college going to seem?

The welfare needs to be tapered off to zero, especially the "have a baby, get a dollar" welfare programs. Education must be imposed. Actual jobs created - even if they are artificially created - and those that do not work, like the rest of humanity, get to starve. Those that do low quality work, also get to starve, because they get fired.

Yea what ever. If you look at the school system ratings you will find that best schools tend to be in the more rural states. Here is the top ten by % of students that graduate. Only one state New Jersey could be called urban.

The big urban states of California and New York are ranked 35th and 39th.

My home state is at the bottom of the list. Why? Our schools suck. Too many retired people that do not want to pay for good schools because "they already paid for their kids to go to school". Well when they get the snot beat out of them by roaming gangs of drop outs we will see. When will people learn that you will pay for schools or for prisons.

If you look at the school system ratings you will find that best schools tend to be in the more rural states. Here is the top ten by % of students that graduate. Only one state New Jersey could be called urban.

Nope. Many of those same states also tend to have high ACT/SAT scores too. The schools are certainly not the giant kid warehouses that you'll find in many metro areas. It's not uncommon to have teachers that not only taught your older siblings, but probably taught or went to school with your parents (depending on the subject, with the same books - our algebra teacher didn't want to get new books. The 20-30 year old ones were still in good shape and had harder problems than any of the new ones). The goo

Yeah California and New York have high education standards hehe.
The mods take down the guy who posted facts (here they are btw) http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_31_tabl e_2.htm and mod +5 the guy with the "but, but..." retort that has absoultly no basis in fact. I'll ofcourse now be modded down for pointing this out. I love it

Now, substitue that by income level of families and then we're talking.

My basic point is that less-well-to-do families have a harder time producing children that do well in school. Economic health is a good indicator for many other problems that less able students face. Lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper materials (i.e., paper, pencils, clothes, shoes, coats, etc.), parents that are less able to spend quality time with the kids, kids from families with a poor social life together, stigmatization from their peers, and families that just resent the kid for ever being born.

You can quibble with me on details and specific cases, but I've been there and seen all of it in action throughout my life. I was a poor kid, but my mother was smart and loving enough to do the right things to help me get ahead in life. She's now a teacher, teaching many children from the POOREST parts of southeast Georgia.

Her kids are the poorest economically and educationally. She does her best, but there's no escaping the effects of simply being dirt poor.

So, in a roundabout way, my point is that comparing performance by economic groups is probably a better way to compare school performance in each state. I don't have the data for this, but maybe I'll look into it.

My suspicion (and I've been told by others that there is data to back this up, any pointers are helpful to confirm this), is that middle-class and up kids do quite damn good across the nation. Poor kids don't do so good across the nation. Differences in other states can probably be correlated to distribution of incomes among populations across the nation.

In other words, poor-performing schools and states are more likely to be such because of a larger share of economically poor families (students) to better-off families.

Bad public schools are a myth. There are, of course, exceptions, but it is not the schools that are bad, but the parents.

Private schools appear to be better than public schools simply because the parents care enough to pay for what they percieve to be better than what they could get for free. These parents that care take part in their child's education to a much greater extent.

In my home town there were 4 large public high schools and 1 large private high school, all 5 about the same size (there were pe

I don't know about the whole creation thing, as I'm not a teacher, but schools in south Georgia (if you live in a city, or even medium sized town) are just holding pens for juvenile criminals. Before I tell this story,let me just say that my teachers were good. I was also AP, in other words taking classes for college credits in high school, so my experience with teachers might not be representative. Anyway, school here is not intended to teach anyone anything, it just keeps the thugs off the street durin

Well, that's an interesting question. Let me give you what might be a relevant example.

Some years ago, an auto parts manufacturing company that I did a lot of contract systems development for moved from Illinois' second largest city (Rockford, some sixty miles from Chicago) out to a completely rural area a hundred and twenty-odd miles even further away from Chicago. I mean, I had to drive out there a few times to upgrade some equipment and I was amazed at just how rural it was. I passed farmland, cows

"Having lived in Tennessee and Alabama for several years at a time, I must say this post is not funny. It's informative. There were people there that I simply could not understand, even after asking them to repeat themselves 5 times."

Well, in our defense...our schools are a bit remiss in not teaching ebonics...and it does make it hard for us to talk to some of you NE urbanites...

Simple. "Downtown" is central. As much of a pain as it might be to get downtown, it can be much more difficult to get from one suburb to another. Public transportation usually isn't even an option in this case. Also, don't forget about how many potential employees live in the city.

That said, there is a trend, at least in the Chicago metro area for companies to put offices in suburbs. They got big high rises in the middle of nowhere. ANd i'll tell you... they SUCK as far as location goes. The only things they have going for them is a cheaper leases and parking. A reverse commute can be just as nasty and, again, public transporation is not an option. It is a car or nothing. It is also more difficult to carpool becuase the chances of a friend going to work in the same area as you is slim.

Typically downtown areas are centrally located which means that if your main concern is to attract "talent" from across a metro region, you have a good chance to make it possible for everyone to get to you.

Second, I think there is a certain amount of cachet from being located downtown.

Third, there are lots of good places to eat lunch.

I used to work for a company in downtown Seattle that was pretty much like what you are describing. Management got the good window view of Elliot Bay and everyone else got c

That's the part I never quite understood about companies that want to be built in downtown areas. The commute sucks cause everyone has to drive to a subway station first. Then take a subway as the 2nd part of commute.

And THAT'S why oil costs so damn much and Americans are so damn fat, everybody!

Hey, you know those buildings that the subway passes by on its way downtown? The ones that are within walking distance of the subway stops? People live in those buildings, and they don't need to drive to the subway station. In fact, often they don't need to own a car at all!

Does the phrase "transit-oriented development" mean anything to you? No, I didn't think it did.

Not to mention that in civilized countries, "downtown" is a pleasant place to live, with lots of services and jobs close to popular apartments for both families and singles. No need for everyone to live in huge monotonous suburbs with one car per family member.

Concentrated business areas mean there are easy access to other businesses nearby. For my organization the fact that one of our possible software vendors being only 3 blocks away mean that we can walk a meeting and resolve issues. Don't underestimate the value of face to face meetings. Closer is better.

The commute doesn't suck if you also live in the area. The general philosophy of zoning in the US is atrociously bad. By zoning large commercial areas away from large residential areas you create traffic. By

There are less of them, because the population is not as dense and because we tend to try putting them to work instead of propping them up forever. A lot of field and construction laborers are homeless men picked up on a corner and driven in the back of the boss's pickup truck to the job site. That doesn't happen up north because of all the labor unions.

Rednecks typically work for a living, either at manual labor or one or two steps

In the country you can do the things you'd get arrested for in the city.

Ever blow up your old tv instead of just throwing it away? How about doing 150mph on a dirt road?

We also get to do a lot of the things y'all pay tons of money for when y'all come visit us, for free. Do you know what it costs to rent a 4-wheeler and go ATV riding? it's pretty bad. We grew up doing it. You like horses? There is a horse farm behind my house.

I grew up in a medium-small town, but have lived in the big apple for about 10 years. I don't know about you, but I definitely feel like I have more privacy in the city as a STRANGER among strangers VS a small town where everybody's business is known.

It's quite liberating to be able to be car-free in the city. The suburban "american dream" with a status-symbol car and a useless lawn is BS. We need to counter that spawl with smarter New Urbanism [newurbanism.org].

A large influx of younger tech workers will probably turn those red states blue. It's already happening in Montana where the influx of people resulted in the election of a democratic governor and a 50/50 split in the state senate. Also states like new mexico and alabama were really close this year.

The difference? You can follow your job to Indiana. Even better is that rural areas have lower costs of living, thus making $50,000/yr a very good wage to have.

Honestly, this isn't anything new. In Wisconsin, we had several big companies move (American Family Insurance, Lands End, etc.) because they could run their operations far cheaper while still being within driving distance of Chicago. It's really a win-win situation for everyone.

Even better is that rural areas have lower costs of living, thus making $50,000/yr a very good wage to have.

Of course, those same jobs that paid $50,000 in the big city are only going to be offered for $40,000 in the rural areas.

Sure, you'll be able to afford more housing for the buck, but lifestyle items (cars, DVDs, even most food products) cost about the same all over the country. You could actually end up with less buying power by following a job out to greener pastures.

120 miles to Starbucks, 210 miles to Frys. Your neighbor in the cubicle next door keeps grousing about Sorgum Prices (whatever that is) and their dating prospects at the next Grange dance. The big local news is the John Deere dealership is expanding, and Billy Joe Bob's sister (yeah the one with THOSE teeth) is makin moon eyes at you when she visits at lunch.
Makes me want to point my pickup truck towards Cupertino and GET OUT OF THERE!

Get over it. Rural is not all that rural anymore. Most places will have pizza delivery, Chinese food, and Walmart. A large number of farmers are on line, have satellite TV and have been using GPS for years. What tends to be lacking is in some areas broadband and no you will not have 85 pizza places to choose from. I for one would love to move to a small rural town with clean air, not crowds, and home prices that are only in the 5 figure range.

Rural Sourcing's fees are about the same as the overall cost of using an Indian outsourcer, she said--if you consider factors such as communication costs, travel expenses and inconvenience.

What I'd like to know is how much money the "inconvenience" factor counts for . . .
Sounds like a catch-all category for costs that is used to magiacally make rural sourcing as cheap as outsourcing to India.

It's referred to as a "soft cost". They can be very difficult to quantify, so, yes, there is probably some fudging of the number to make it work. However, the "inconvenience factor" as well as cultural differences are two of the items you will see on almost every outsourcing pros & cons list.

as cultural differences are two of the items you will see on almost every outsourcing pros & cons list.
and there's no cultural differences between a former farm hand from Alambama and an investment banker from NYC. No sir...

I have been on several projects which involved business units on the other side of the world. There are times when you basically lose a day because you find something in the morning that needs the other team to fix. This can be mitigated by forcing one team or the other to shift their work schedule, but this can cause other problems for the team who are forced to change.

Also if you are dealing with hardware it is a lot easier to get something overnighted in country than having to deal with customs.

I don't think the idea is to pay Americans the same wage as Indians. I think the idea is to have the same effective cost per employee. The fact that Indians are half-way around the world tends to result in a lot of hidden costs. These hidden costs add up and make an Indian worker just as expensive as a cheap American worker.

Actually... the idea is to get the same cost per unit output. No one in business really cares how much they pay their employees (or at least no one with any brains). What they care about is what they have to pay per unit output. If hiring a rural-american to costs $30/hour, and they produce 10 widgets/hour, and hiring an Indian costs $5/hour and they produce 1 widget/hour, you'd have to be incredibly dim to hire the Indian ($5/widget) vs the rural-american ($3/widget). It's all about costs and productiv

I landed in the Kansas City area after the
bubble burst in Boston. Living costs are quite modest here, and it is a pleasant place to live.
The hacking is the same. That does
not stop my company from outsourcing to India
though. Slavery is very attractive to business.

Kansas City is not rural. It may be a shade smaller than Boston, but if you've gotta drive more than 10-15 minutes to see farmland, you're not in a rural area. KC spans 2 friggin' states, has professional sports teams, and more than 1 Wal-Mart. Rural areas generally do none of those things.

In his trilogy on "the information age", manuel castells looked at the evolving and future structure of current society. One of his suggestions, which I remember clearly, is to forget looking at first, second and third world as being rigidly defined around countries (i.e. the idea that some are "first", others are "second", etc).

He suggests that the world is really becoming a patchwork of first, second and third - so that even so called advanced countries (on average) have third world areas, and even third world countries have first world areas. When you look at it this way, then it shouldn't be surprising about "outsourcing" from advanced economic zones (e.g. SF) to third world zones (e.g. places in the deep south).

Either way, I found this conceptual idea of his to be a very powerful one.

I have not read the book, but it does sound interesting. However, comparing "places in the deep south" to third world countries either (a) overestimates poverty in the deep south (depth and breadth), (b) underestimates poverty in third world countries, or (c) both. I'm not saying poverty doesn't exist in the U.S. - it definitely does - but it does not compare to poverty in third world countries!

While in a manner of speaking I'm all for this, it's already been done to death.

Throughout the last 100-someodd years, the rest of the US has looked to the South as "cheap labor" -- most of the factories that've closed here paid just at or barely above minimum wage, with no option for any real pay raises, and offer conditions that no state in the North would accept. Perhaps this is just a return to that trend. I can only hope that the trend of severe employee abuse won't carry over.

I've sold my company's services simply by pointing out that my rates (in Indiana) are much cheaper than similar firms in New York, California, or even nearby Chicago.

You want to pay $150+ an hour for a Chicago guy to do the same thing that we'll do for $75 an hour?

This can bite you when they find another firm offering $50/hour. At some point, it's just not cost effective to run a business that cheap... not to mention that you'll have a harder time finding qualified employees to work for so little.

If I could make the salary of a comparable California worker, but live in Indiana, I'd be doing very well.

If you've saved enough money for a down payment in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can buy a house for cash in rural America. And if you've been there long enough that you actually own your house in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can sell it, buy a house and a Ferrari, and have change left over for a fucking Porsche in rural America. That's right.

Wanna visit the opera? Hop in the Ferrari on Friday after work, tear up the asphalt (long live long straight highways featuring speed limits defined only by the words "reasonable and prudent" -- it's like the American Autobahn!), party your ass off all weekend, and come home on Sunday.

One look at the horrible things he's done to a Ferrari should make any self-respecting geek aspire to make John Romero our bitch. The best part about rural America isn't that a middle-class IT geek can enjoy such a lifestyle -- it's that he or she can pay for it on the interest and tax savings alone.

Who is John Galt? When you leave a high-tax state for rural America, you are.

Face the facts. If you say that India is a outsourcing success story, look at the reasons why. On average, goods in India, barring housing and cars, cost only 20% (or less) of what it costs here in USA. On top of it, the standards of a good life and luxury are far lower than in the US.

In California, you call yourself middle-class if you have a 0.5 mil house, a boat, 2 cars etc. In India, most middle class folks consider a car with a boot as a luxury car (i'm not joking, Hyundai Accent, Ford Ikon, Fiat Siena etc. are considered high-end luxury cars). Even a person driving a small hatch-back considers himself/herself as having acheived something. This is why the big multinationals can afford to pay 10% of what they pay in the US, and still manage to retain a happy workforce!

Add to that, an abundance of intelligent, hard-working, English speaking people, extremely willing to slog for 12 hours a day so that they can save enough over 3-5 years to afford a Maruti Suzuki 800 (yes, it's a ~780 cc car), who can compete with that? Yes, there's still issues, such as infrastructure, accents, timezone differences, etc. and lots of bad apples in the workforce too, but it still doesnt overpower the cost advantage.

It's a bit like how the x86 architecture took over the computer world. People assumed initially, and rightly too, that x86 was inefficient and too cheap. What they didn't count on was that as x86 sold more and more, it also innovated and improved, and very soon, offered a double-whammy cost AND performance advantage over the other proprietary systems. Again, people pad up the costs by factoring communication cost, travel cost etc. What they don't realize is that these costs are firstly, marginal, and secondly, reducing over time.

The cost of living in the midwest or in rural America might be somewhat less than the metros or the coasts, but it cannot compete with the cost advantage offered by countries like India, Taiwan, China etc.

IMHO, rural america can compete effectively with other IT companies. Only, they need to sing a different song. They have to be flexible and play on their natural strengths and not on their weaknesses. For example, if a lot of techies in the small towns and villages got together, formed a virtual company or organization, and offered standardized software solutions to local businesses and institutions, there is NO way that the big city businesses or another country could compete with them. Don't compete on cost, compete on value.

I worked at a development shop in Little Rock, Arkansas for a couple of years before getting married and moving to a very large U.S. city (I think it is #4 currently) when my wife was accepted to medical school here, so I think I'm qualified to do a bit of comparison.

I think that there are a lot of cities in the U.S. in the 100,000 - 200,000 population range that people don't really consider for whatever reason, either as places to live or for corporations. Little Rock, for example, had most of the shopping, dining, etc. of a larger city but without nearly as much pollution and traffic and with a lower cost of living to boot. To respond specifically to some of the comments I've seen in this thread so far: we had Starbucks, pizza delivery, clubs/raves (if that is your thing), a symphony orchestra, and a minor league baseball team (the only thing that I would miss if I moved back would be the professional sports).

I think there is rural, as in one gas station, one stoplight, and a Sonic...and then there is "rural", as in "not one of the 50 largest cities in the US", and I think businesses would do well to look more closely at the latter.

I've been working with outsourcing for over a year and 1/2 now. We've been talking about how we should move to some rural area with low taxes, property values, and housing costs for a year now. It just makes sense IF you can get quality individuals working for you. And it will happen more frequently as fed up highly talented individuals get tired of the rat race and decide to move somewhere, uh, less rat racy. I know of one person on the team who now works from Idaho after moving from Chicago. Do the math, Idaho cost of living is < Chicago and they experienced no pay decreases! Another person moved from Chicago to rural Wisconsin and kept the same pay. If the company is willing, you'll see a migration from the cities to the small towns over the next few years. I personally think it's great. The 80's and 90's were an era of migration from these rural areas where the jobs had been drying up rapidly (I'm a case in point, couldn't get a job in my hometown doing what I do, still can't). Hopefully that trend will reverse somewhat. America is loosing it's small town / rural heritage and I believe that heritage is part of what made America a great place in the first place.

This is exactly what the country needs: "Blue" business/culture centers connecting directly with "Red" labor centers. More intercommunication is the only way to bridge the unsustainably deep divides between Blue/Red communities. American strength in diversity relies also on rural areas, perhaps homogenous internally, but part of the landscape that makes America a microcosm of the world. Why should American globalism rest on a hollow foundation, ignoring the interior solely to harness the exterior?

I worked for an Australian company that with a bit of government funding and support from a major university setup a software engineering course in a rural city (100,000 people?), where they would complete their degree part time while working on real contracts.

No where else other than the major cities could they hope to get a degree like that in Australia. And having the work experience behind them would have made them highly employable.

I still believe the idea was good, but starting this just as the bubble burst meant that there was little work and after a couple of years it was closed down.

There was a lot of difficulty in attracting work to the centre since there were always about their ability being junior engineers. So we had to attract some senior engineers there as well to lead the teams. That was harder than attracting contracts, since we were the only employer in the area looking for those skills. But fundamentally the inability of the company to attract work for itself let alone the training center was its downfall.

What happened to the people that were there? Many have now moved to the cities to complete their degrees and get work.

I grew up in a semi-rural area in the mountains in California. The closest store was an hour and a half walk away. No food delivery, and there were power outages every winter and spring whenever it rained heavily for a few days in a row and a mudslide knocked out the power lines. Now I live in Silicon Valley, and other than visiting my parents or attending family get-togethers, I'm not heading back any time soon.

For one thing, food. I'm a foodie and I love variety. In addition to burgers and sandwiches, I am walking distance from Philippine, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even Armenian food. If I want to cook something, I'm less than 10 minutes from Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Indian supermarkets, as well as a couple of American ones and a fresh-produce store that acts as kind of a permanent farmer's market. Can I get a reliable supply of sumac [kfunigraz.ac.at] or fenugreek [kfunigraz.ac.at], a durian [csuchico.edu], or fresh kaffir lime leaves [thaitable.com] in rural America?

When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.

A lot of midsize towns and cities have cineplexes and shopping malls. Catching "Revenge of the Sith" will be no problem anywhere in the country. But I also like to go see more obscure stuff like "Primer" [imdb.com] -- hard enough to find even in a big city with lots of art houses. Short of waiting for the DVDs or pirating them over the Internet, I doubt I'd be able to find most of the cult films I've seen in nearby theaters if I lived in a rural area. (One theater in San Jose used to show Hong Kong action films and anime every Tuesday night, though it has since changed owners and now shows Bollywood musicals.)

For exercise and socializing, I enjoy ballroom dance (the competition-style variety, more like figure skating than like Grandma and Grandpa at your sister's wedding). I am walking distance from a giant ballroom studio that gets a crowd of several hundred people four nights a week, and on any given Saturday night I'm twenty minutes' drive from at least four other ballroom venues, not to mention more salsa clubs than I can count.

I like meeting people with all sorts of different backgrounds, and this area gives me that in spades. There is no ethnic majority in San Jose. [brainyencyclopedia.com] Three of my last four girlfriends grew up in foreign countries (China, Australia, and Vietnam) which suits me fine -- I like hearing a completely different perspective on things I find familiar and commonplace. There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.

Yes, the traffic here can be annoying. But that's why we have telecommuting -- I work from home three out of five days most weeks, so my typical commute time is the 10 seconds it takes me to get from my bedroom to my home office.

The economy here would have to get really bad before I'd consider moving back to a rural area. Urban areas with their melting-pot cultures and abundance of activities that are only economically viable with a certain population density suit me much, much better.

Rural outsourcing would help people living in rural areas get jobs. Because business looks at an areas pay scale before they decide what to offer the tech style jobs will be lower in rural America than in the cities and that will probably be good for business.

The rural techs would "steal" jobs from their urban counterparts and would cheapen the overall value of technical jobs.

The truth is there are already a lot of underpaid technical types in rural areas. Today you can consider mechanics technical types and people with these analytical skills do live in rural areas.

I grew up in a small midwestern town. I left. I left because I like computers and I like being well paid. You don't find many computer jobs in small towns and you don't find hardly any decent paying jobs in small towns.

Still keeping the jobs in the US is a boon to the country and getting rural areas jobs will help with the chronic unemployment in these towns. But there is nothing to stop these folks from gaining experience and moving to the city in search of better pay! If that happens there will be a larger surplus of us tech types in the city and our pay will slide closer to the rural folks. So for me, perhaps it is bad.

My wife and I moved from the beach in San Diego to the mountains of Northern Arizona almost 7 years ago. We find the cost of living to be very much lower here (and with wilderness surrounding us for hiking and picnicking, the standard of living much better).

We both work fewer hours per week and for usually lower pay, and much less stress. Anyway, it works for us.

The internet and cheap flat rate long distance makes telecommuting possible, but still not as effective as being on site. I try to spend time on consulting, writing and developing a few (very much niche) software products.

Rural Sourcing began pitching its services this summer and can boast of five major customers, including a large telecommunications company, White said. She said the companies haven't given their permission to be named publicly.

Though I don't have any inside information, I'd bet the unnamed company is Verizon.

Call up their tech support number and you will hear an American on the other end. Several times, I've talked to someone with a southern accent.

Most of all, it seems the most amaturish support center I've ever called. 9 problems out of 10, I'll get a completely different answer from each support person I talk to. They seem quite determined to pass the buck, giving me any answer they can make up that will require me to call back. You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard some lame answer, that all the problems will be magically fixed "tomorrow", even when they've gone on for weeks. And, of course, they NEVER fail to mark the issue as CLOSED, when they've never solved anything. This screws up the automated phone system, requiring me to call it a "NEW" issue every time I call in about the same thing.

If you're wondering about the 10th time out of 10, I'll get the exact same response from 4 different people, but they'll all be COMPLETELY wrong.

Anyhow, I never understood what was happening there, but this story seems to fit perfectly, and explain the issue.

Of course, I certainly hope I'm wrong, and Verizon support just happens to be terrible. I'm the last person to advocate outsourcing, so I hope REALLY crappy American support isn't the only alternative.

The governments of small midwestern states have been pimping out their citizens to businesses as people who will work long and hard without complaining for minimum wage and few benefits. They turn around and tell those citizens they are working hard to bring quality, high-paying jobs.

The citizens of these states, especially the "young" people between 18 and 35, have figured this out and are turning their backs on the government of their homes. The past decade has been characterized by a massive outmigration from rural states to Top 50 metropolises. It's a literal brain drain for the communities they leave.

The community in which I live has a special economic development fund that has been an unmitigated disaster, taking tax dollars from our sales tax and giving it to companies who promise to bring in a certain amount of new jobs. There has been, in practice, no accountability and the jobs have sucked. Firms have closed overnight, taking millions of tax dollars with them and leaving hundreds of citizens unemployed with back pay due they'll never see.

The largest employers in this village of ~40,000 people are (besides the air force base, hospital and school district) a technical help desk contractor, a hotel reservation phone pool, a airline reservation phone pool, an insurance agency phone pool, and an adult vocational training center. Despite the "success" of most of these businesses starting within the last 5 years, the median wage has stayed flat at around $25,000.

There are some bright spots. A home that costs ~$150,000 dollars here would set you back ~$2,000,000 in Silicon Valley. Our arts culture here is very strong thanks to the local university, including our excellent volunteer symphony orchestra. I guess that's about it.

Crime isn't low because of the meth epidemic. I have a buddy on the county's drug enforcement squad and the stories he can tell would make for a terrific Al Pacino movie. Except for our housing costs, our cost of living is comparable to the rest of the nation but the fresh produce isn't as fresh nor as diverse.

Now a Super Wal*Mart is scheduled to open next year and our "civic leaders" are touting this as another economic development success. The truth is the citizens are tired of working two or three jobs to get in 40 hours a week and enough of a paycheck to support three kids in their 70's era trailer or trashy $600/month apartment.

I'm lucky to have a great federal government job as a systems administrator. My wife is a dental hygienist with an almost unbelievably fantastic work and pay schedule. We are very lucky.

But to those who would pimp out my neighbors or "outsource" more shitty jobs to communities like this I say go to hell. If the Indians or Chinese or Mexicans will take this shit they are welcome to it. That's not flamebait or nationalism or anything of the sort. It's the truth.

Tulsa, Oklahoma is a call center mecca. There are 80 plus call centers here. Some are small but most employ hundreds. It's about the only thing left after all the other industries imploded (oil, aviation, telecommunications). These jobs typically pay $8-$10/hr which isn't a bad wage for someone with only a high school education. The work itself is another matter.

They are cubicle sweathshops. Poor training coupled with the most micromanaged industry in the known Universe creates a highly stressed work environment where employment is measured in months. Turnover is high but they can always turn around and get a job at another call center for a few more months. With so many people out of work from formerly high paying jobs they have a ready supply of desperate workers.

The best selling point for outsourcing to Oklahoma is that it's like an emerging third world country, but here at home. It's mostly rural with pockets of high technology. The cost of living is low. It's in the central time zone so they only have to get up an hour earlier to take calls from the East coast and stay two hours later to take calls from the West coast. And most people have a high school education. And best of all they speak English even if it has an Okie twang to it.

There are probably more people like you out there than most people would think. If this kind of thing took off, it would provide a decent job market for people like you and me who want to remain in rural areas. It's not the kind of life for everyone (but don't tell those people too much - I don't want it to get crowded).

Like you, I am from the rural midwest, but was blessed with the opportunity to move back to my hometown and run a good sized network.

No, land of the fundamentalist Christians. They all used to be Democrats!

Yes, it's true, they used to be democrats, 40 or 50 years ago. But now that the Dems make their left wing social platform such a large part of their platform, they're becoming republicans.They're tired of hearing that America sucks and that people who still hold onto the idea of morals and values are a bunch of bigoted idiots.

People who mock those in rural areas really need to get an f'en clue. Most of the idiots on

I've lived in rural and I've lived in cities. I prefer cities. Rural people do, indeed, *tend* to be honest and real hard working. There are good reasons for this. They also tend to be bigoted and intolerant of strangers. (And there are good reasons for this.)

City people *tend* to be different along those axii, and there are reasons for that. Good, logical reasons. (Like they encounter new people and ideas more frequently.)

I like and admire honesty. I try to be honest. This doesn't cause me to admire bigotry. And I find bigotry too high a price to pay for achieving honesty. (Also an unnecessary price.)

As for hard working...people who are desperate will work themselves to death. That's no moral good. People who are working for themselves will work quite hard for years on end. That may or may not be a moral good, but it's also enlightened self interest. People who are being taken advantage of will slack off whenever the slave master isn't looking. And I consider THIS to be a moral good.

The thing to remember is that the best-and-brightest of India -- the IIT grads -- do not stay in India, most of them are able to grab green cards and work for even more in the US than they could in India.

The current outsourcing population in India is the second tier. Which is still pretty decent, but there's a limited supply of them and eventually they will price themselves out of the market.

The problem in India is that there's no good third tier. You either have at least bachleurs degree and probably a masters degree, or you are almost illiterate. This isn't any sort of bell-curve intellectual gap, it's mostly that the public pre-college education in India is awful. And there's a lot of waste there -- kids who might become great thinkers but because they are culturally expected to be lower class, they are. I used to think that a good way to disrupt the social order there would be to educate the poor, but it's a much more complicated problem than that.

In the US, at least you still have a good population of folks to send to community college.

You wrote:Anyone get the feeling the uber rich of the world are majorly screwing the middle-class and trying to make the divide bigger.

Maybe come next election, the people should vote out all the corporate ho's in congress, senate and the white house. It's time the people get represented, instead of getting shafted. Most of the time projects fail because of bad managers. Who are the bad managers? The guys at the top define the culture and it goes down from there. Those people come from rich families with